"In the early 1980s, just before Los Angeles put on its second Olympic Games, British journalist Richard Rayner came here and fell reluctantly, madly in love with this city. Los Angeles—from which I write—offered him a blithe nuttiness: earthquakes, civil unrest, mindless heat (Rayner once spied a hapless citizen trying to take shelter from the sun in the shade of a telephone pole) and especially, a panoply of truly grotesque and off-the-wall crime. In A Bright and Guilty Place, Rayner uses crime as a key to the secrets of this seductive metropolis, and the time frame he has chosen seems unnervingly appropriate for today: He begins with the last few euphoric years before the crash of 1929 and continues a few more years, into the depths of the Depression, by which time somber reality had knocked optimistic if corrupt L.A. off its shaky emotional pins. To love this book you have to love the wonderful novels of Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, where only the flimsiest veneer of freshness and glamour covers a decaying, even disgusting reality. If you can go along with that point of view, this social history will be a bonanza for you, a boundless source of creepy joy."—Washington Post Book World